The Other Woman

A not-very-funny revenge comedy that continually undercuts its girl-power premise

Ugh. Is Nick Cassavetes' comedy really the state of on-screen female empowerment in 2014 — three women in skin-tight clothing babbling on about the one awful man they share? The predictable plot finds the wife (a particularly shrill Leslie Mann), the sleek age-appropriate mistress (Cameron Diaz) and the bikini-babe mistress No. 2 (Kate Upton) of Mr. Mark King (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) discovering one another and forging an alliance to take revenge. It's painful to sit through — not very funny (oh, explosive diarrhea jokes!), a conspicuous waste of talent and jaw-droppingly tone-deaf about its gender politics. Women, in case we've forgotten despite endless iterations of this stereotype on screen, are defined by their (1) relationship to men, (2) hysterical nature and (3) shoes. And so it is in The Other Woman, a film you should not bother getting involved with in the first place.